Jesse Singal || Fad Psychology

University's School of Public and International Affairs. His book The Quick Fix, Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills has just been published. Jesse, Wow, man, I just have so much I want to discuss with you today. I read the book and feel like you condemned my whole field. So I can't wait to Jack. I say, like, I feel you're a very good guy and a very fair guy,

but I definitely criticize some of your people. So I'm happy to get into it like some of my like dearest friends, not just some of my people like you know, like. But anyway, it's all good, all in the spirit of openness and making the field of psychology better. Which I'm all about. So I want to kind of go back to the kind of origined story of this. You were at Science of Us. It's around twenty fifteen, like around

September twenty fifteen or even before that. You're getting lots of press releases and you're kind of just taking them all face value. Like so you're getting inboxes, emails in your in box, You're like, Wow, here's the latest new press release. Here's the latest new study. That's it's you know, we found, it's this is better than sliced bread. You know what we found. It's so exciting. It's so exciting. And then you know, so give me like the pre

Jesse and the post Jesse. So the Prejess you would look at those kind of emails and be like, wow, I got to write about it because obviously they know what they're talking about. Yeah, that right. Well I think it was a little bit. I do think I like noticed something was afoot, and we did a pretty good

job at like resisting that sort of thing. Like there was this famous study about hurricanes versus himmickanes, where the theory was due to some social primary effect hurricanes with female names people didn't take as seriously and wouldn't flee from so more of them died and this ended up being widely mocked and we actually read My colleague Melissa Dahl wrote a good article explaining why this likely wasn't true. But I was not skeptical enough, and I felt like

I was not actively debunking it. And you know, around then, a lot of science outlets were very excited about social psychology, and I think didn't maybe apply enough critical thought to the claims that would pass along. And as you said, that problem of like writing directly off of a press release is pretty bad because like a lot of science journalists don't read the actual studies, and the press releases often misrepresent them for sure. But when did you kind

of catch on to that. It was around September two thousand and fifth, I believe, and I feel like the IT came on your radar and then you're like, wait a minute, there might be something to what this person is telling me about to look deeper into the it. Yeah, I received an email from a guy with some training in psych who basically said, like, there's a story here, the itIt isn't as good as people say it is.

That was when something really flipped in my head because the IAT I think I had more or less taken at face value. And I wrote a headline for I think a slightly viral study write up about how white people think black people are magical, and that was based on some it result where they I forget what it was, but they associated black people with magical words quicker, and I bet if I could go back now and look deeply into the methodology, I would not have written that

study up in that way. But yeah, you know I went from I went, but who could resist that headline white people think black people are magical? Oh? Absolutely? But it's almost interesting to just think, like, what if you wrote the headline today like that much has changed in four in five years that I've fe like it would just have a whole different reception to it. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Once I think with the I t the fact that it was hosted by Harvard and Mazarine Benaji is a really well respected Harvard social psychologist, I started thinking like if if a test with such big names behind it and such institutions behind it is whatever else you think about it, and there's real debate over how useful it is. I'm not saying it's useless, but the very least, I think their most impressive early claims have not been born out. And if everyone can believe in a test like that,

what else am I missing? What other ideas am I passing on to readers without fully vetting them? Am I part of the problem? And I think that you know, that led me down a path toward a little bit more of a debunkie role. Well, it's really responsible for you. I remember, and I remember those articles that you wrote.

I remember that Jesse like vividly, just like I remember the Jesse from the front, Yeah, from that column the Science of Us called Jesse the Science of Us, Like I remember that that incarnation of you, you know what I mean, Jesse from the block and yeah, And that's when you first came on my radar. And I was impressed. I mean I was, you know, I was like, wow, he's he's he's not doing what every other journalist science journalist is doing. Thank you? Yeah? Yeah, so that was cool.

So you use this phrase fad psychology in your book, and I was wondering, like, what, like, can you define that? What is fad psychology? I want to make sure that I'm not doing fad psychology in my research. Yeah, I think we use it more in the title than the book. But it's basically I've noticed this pattern where a new idea will burst onto the scene via a Ted talk

or a book or some combination of them. It will suddenly attract a lot of media attention, often a lot of research funding, a lot of interest within psychology, and then a few years later, when we have more data, it turns out that maybe there wasn't that much there in the first place, there wasn't that much to be

excited about. Power posting, I think is one of the cleaner examples of this, because I think there's like a little bit of a there there, a little bit something where maybe it can improve people's you know, felt sense of power, but nowhere near the claims that were accompany the original Ted talk. So to me, that's a fat It's like everyone chasing the shiny new idea without really looking deeply into the strength of the evidence, at least

at first. Yeah, you know, reading your whole book and I which I which I read in all in one past because it kind of reads like a novel, Like I recommend people if they have if they have like

the two three hours. I think you next you can actually read your whole book, you know, perhaps you know it's it, and just reading it, I was left with, like, you know, like wow, there's a real deep truth here that they're a thread that runs through all this, which is that if you're that certain people throughout history and and also in our generation who say certain make certain claims, they're going to be more popular than other clams it

regardless whether you're a psychologist, regardless of whether you're Tony Robbins kind of figure. If you make some claims that that suggest that, wow, we're capable of so much more, you know that that uh that there are characteristics that yes, maybe your environment sucks, but there are things that you can change and and and not just change a little bit, but change dramatically. There are things you can change. You know, people are craving to hear that, especially those who lack hope.

I I did a noun statistical analysis, and I've been planning on writing about this. Who like who who reads self help? Like? I did a statistical a nounce of the personality traits that are correlated with interesting. Isn't that cool? Isn't that I'm gonna I'm gonna have to write this up. But I found that, like it's people with like mostly like really low self esteem, you know, and that's it. I mean, that's the population. You find your target population.

You find people low self esteem. You say, hey, personal low self esteem, you got you can do it. You know, I'm gonna give you so much. I'm gonna give you the the panacea, you know, and they'll be like, oh,

I'm listening, I'm listening. Go on, right, I mean, yeah, And I think that's I mean, I talk a little bit about the history, but there's something particularly American about that, where there's always something in our cultural waters about if you can just change your mindset, it'll transform your life. And sometimes you know, with like the secret this Rhonda Bayern idea that that Oprah helped promote it, it gets very literal, like if you can literally think about a possibility,

including a new car, it'll manifest itself. So yeah, I mean the book, the book is partly a critique of that, but part of the reason I'm excited to be on this podcast is I think you do have some hope that that there is some room people have to improve themselves, as do I. The book is more about critiquing overclaimed claims in that regard. But but I you know, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Me neither. And I mean, I look, my whole research career has been wanting to give people hope in the sense showing them they do have greater potential than they we realized through a man developed all these self actization tests and everything. I mean, you went very easy on me. You didn't mention me at all in your book, because you know, you turn the you know, all the psychologists are reading your book, turning the page and be like, is he gonna is he? Is he gonna get right

about me? But I'm being cheeky. But you know we're friends, so I can. I can be that way with you. But but also I don't I don't really get the sense that you commit. I don't want to call them sins. No one's getting murdered here, but I don't I don't know. I don't view you as an overclaimer. I view you as someone trying to study this stuff in a pretty responsible way. Thank you well. That that means your incredible Scott, thank you all, thank you so much. Just now that

means a lot to me. I really I try really really hard to like do it right, you know what I mean? I try hard and uh and uh and you know, like I'm interested in in using rigorous science to see what we are capable of changing and to see what, you know, what we could be as a species and as as a human. So when you said, you know, you don't throw out the baby of the bathroom, I'm glad you said that, you know, because neither do I.

I definitely want to address weak science. But but are we both on aligned in saying that one can apply a rigorous scientific approach to a vow to evaluating programs and things and and may and we could find that some of these programs do have large effects. You know, you're you're you're surely not saying you know, no, no

scientists allowed to find a large effect for an intervention. No, you know, I think mindset interventions are actually a good concrete example to focus on here, because uh, and you know, when I go on to sort of a normal layperson podcast, I would I would explain what those are. Do you think your listeners more or less know what mindset interventions are? I could give the quick E give the click give the click. Yeah. The idea of mindset intervention is people

tend to have either fixed or growth mindsets. A fixed mindset is this is how strong I am. This is how smart I am. That limits me. I'm not I can't improve. So the idea of a mindset intervention, especially with kids, is to change their sense of their intelligence and their academic potential from fixed to growth. So you go from I failed that test, I'm an idiot, I'll never be smart too. Well, if I work harder, I can do better on the text the next time, the

test the next time. And Carol Dwak is sort of the main evangelist behind these ideas, and she was criticized, I think rightly for overhyping them a little bit. I think she made really big claims about the utility of this intervention, and I think to a lot of debunkie science people it was teetering on the brink of full debunking.

Then there was a very big, rigorous study in I want to say Nature that you know, it had all the components of a genuine program evaluation, and what it found was not huge effect sizes, but for the most

academically vulnerable kids, this seems to work. It seems to nudge them a bit closer to staying on track for graduation, and it points to like a very specific cost effective setting, which is, you know, I don't know exactly how to implement this, but let's say halfway through the academic year, you take the bottom twenty percent of the class and you give them this intervention and it takes like an hour. So I think at the end of the day, with a lot of these ideas, we might eventually end up

somewhere where there's a cost effective intervention. But the bigger claims that you know, everyone should do this or there's really big effect sizes, that's where I'm more skeptical until there's data. Yeah, I hear what you're saying. I do have some responses that. First of all, David Yeager is a colleague of DUEX, and he's been I mean, he's been writing papers arguing there. I think he even wrote an article called there is no magic. You know, there's

no magical intervention. So he's been, you know, to his credit, he's been trying to make clear that there are there are cost effective, cheap interventions that can move the dial in an education set a little bit but they're not magic. Also, yeah, I had Carol Dwek on my podcast and it was one of the rare podcasts that she agreed to be on and we and I didn't I mean, I didn't hold back anything. I gave her every single possible criticism

and went through all the papers. I highly recommend you and the listeners listened to as you know, as a follow up to this, listen to my discussion with Carole Dewac. I find I found her to be incredibly gracious, humble, But there there's just was one moment where I would say my only point of contention. There was one moment where you know, we literally went through all of the findings.

She agreed, you know, she's like, yeah, you're right, like in that instance, yeah, it was a really small effect size. That's why we're working at specific populations. You know. She finds that those with a lo se s and those with few opportunities might benefit more from these interventions versus others. But there was one point I said, so do you

still stand by the statement? And I read the statement saying something along the lines that like it's that that mindset is kind of like a revolutionary or like completely transformative. I said, do you still stand by that? And there was this moment in an interview she says she thinks about it, and I mean we had just gone through all the small effects. I think she's like, yeah, I still stand by it, Scott. Yeah. And it was a

fascinating because I consider myself friends with her. Do you know what I mean, like these these these aren't these things aren't personal, you know, like I, if she's listening, as she probably will listen to this podcast, I want to say, you know, like I admire her and I

think she does great research. But that was an interesting moment because I just don't know if I would have, like, I think that, like if I had just like gone through all that same data, I think I maybe I would have been like, yeah, I think I maybe have overhyped it a little bit. I think maybe I would say that, you know, I had a very similar in my chapter on Grit. I had a similar thing with

Angela Duckworth, who I'm not friends with her. I've never met her in person, but she was like gracious enough to answer my emails and she's been pretty good about not overhyping grit and slowing down the grit train. Yeah, I agree, But when I asked her about her most famous QUES, which is about grit beating the pants off of traditional measures, like you know, intelligence, she wouldn't really back off from it. And I don't think that's justified.

I just you know, there's something we're humans, and once we say something and put it out on the public record, it's probably hard to sort of in effect retract it. But yeah, you know, I would say the researchers in my book run the gamut in terms of how responsible they've been, and not everyone who accidentally ignites a viral, half baked idea is malicious or did so malevolently. There

are errors, there are incentives. But I think where I hope my book will move the needle is once your idea is out there and perhaps getting more attention and a claim that it deserves, what do you do at that point? Do you rein it back in or do you just keep doubling and tripling down? And I hope more researchers make the right decision on that front. Yeah, and you made a really good point, like scientists are

humans too, Yeah, and you know we're it. It's not a very you know, on the whole science is is not as it is not a very glamorous field. That's what I'm trying to look for, not like podcasting. It's not like podcasting. That's right, That's that's what you know that. That's why I was like, yeah, I'm just gonna I'm just I'm going to the podcast in the root because there's a lot a lot more fun and glamorous and I get to show off my hair. My hair looks

good today, doesn't it, Jesse. But I think it's great you put effort into mind. I'm just at full jufho deployment, no colman, no brushing, not very professional. I hope my publishers okay with this. That's hilarious. By the way, I'm being ironic and joke. I don't think my hair looks at glamor well you know what, I'm not sure everyone can see it the way I can. I think it looks great, Scott, so well, thanks Jesse. But you know human,

I almost said humans are scientists too. Scientists are humans? True? Also true. I was like, actually that's what it works. It works, but uh like, let me just let me just articulate all these points I wanted to articulate today because there's it's such tricky territory, you know, like to get grants. Here here's for instance, just I'm giving you like the inner world of what it's like to be

a scientist, because it's really not easy. Okay, you you're you're porous, f right you you know you the only thing you have to not be homeless, that that separates you from being on the homeless is getting a grant sometimes, and to get a grant, you they actually say in the Grand application, tell us why your research is like the greatest things in slice spread Like they are essentially

telling you to do that. And you know, I remember working on Grand applications and definitely over hyping for the sake of the of getting the grant. You know, you know, not that not lying. I tried to never lie, but but just like saying, how oh my god, it's so exciting we found this correlation here and we want to like, you know, keep working on So there's that mechanism. There is something that just occurred to me on reading this is like I think it's important to hold scientists to

a high standard. But here's my question for you, like you know, like, yeah, okay, the book is picking on some scientists, but like, why do we hold scientists to a higher standard than like Tony Robbins kind of figures like why did they get or here's another way of framing it, why did they get a free pass just because they're not scientists? Oh, I like see what I'm saying. Well, but that's sort of one of the points in my book.

I don't think I make it explicitly, but one of my critiques of social psychology and positive psychology, and this is something positive psychologists themselves have worried about, is that it's preaking a little bit close to like self help, and I think in some way psychology and self help help become intertwined. And the reason I wouldn't ta spend a book teeing off on Tony Robbins is because I

think it's so obviously wrong. Whereas some of these ideas they have like Ivy League institutions behind them and helping to hype them up. So it's like in my social world and my parents' social world, these ideas are very popular, so I think I can do more good debunking them. Self help. I mean, I think Americans spend ten billion dollars a year on self help that will always be with us, and I think psychologist should want to differentiate

themselves from that. Yeah, I hear what you're saying. I just I just want to dive deeper in this point because it's been bothering me for a while. Yes, as these two domans become closer and closer to each other, because they really are, especially with the field of positive psychology, I mean, it's just it's no doubt. Why don't we Why aren't we all interested in the truth, regardless of

who it comes from. Because the thing is, I can't tell you how many conversations I have with with really really big time best selling self help book writers and I'll say to them like, where's the evidence for that? Where's the evidence? And they say, well, I'm not a scientist, and I don't claim to be a scientist. That's what they say. And then it's like free free pass. And then and not only that, but they do get a

free pass by saying that. Yeah, but why shouldn't like I feel like, let's bring everyone together in the room from every stars as stripes. I think that's kind of even a broader spirit of book. I just feel like your book, Geve hasn't even hasn't even broader message I'm trying to articulate, you know. Yeah, well so if if let me think that through, if schools were bringing in self help figures to affect their curricula, I would of course critique that. What's more likely is they'll bring in

social psychologists. But a counterpoint to that is is some of the more cutting edge diversity, equity and inclusion stuff that both schools and companies are are paying for is basically self help, and that there's no often no evidence for it or no solid evidence. So that's that's a case where like it's not only psychologists delivering those programs, but whoever delivers them should be held to account anyone who is trying to make money off an idea that

makes certain claims. I agree with you completely. I wish we were all more scientific and evaluating all of these claims. Yeah, and that no one like there's like outside of the there's no outside the realm of science, like you can't like I think this is just becoming an increasing problem

in our society right now. Is that you know, with conspiracy theories, with with with ideas that there's no such thing as objective truth, you know, now, like everything is subjective, I just see a larger problem, a larger trend of just like, well, look, you know, you have your belief in that science, and I have my belief which isn't science, and we can't wait, you know, let's just all have

our different belief systems. And it's like, well, I don't know about that when it comes to things like a validate evaluating whether or not certain interventions will work, or whether or not we should apply things large scale, I don't know if there's a there's anything else other than the scientific method to help us, to help us evaluate that. I guess this is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I think it's all we got. I mean, how else do we know what ideas work and what ideas don't.

And that doesn't mean that just because science has proven something, it's right. I mean, that's the whole point in my book. But yeah, I just I think most most Americans, in most people, I don't want to sound elitist, but they're not great critical thinkers because critical thinking is difficult, and it's easier to accept a story that sounds good and that we want to be true. So yeah, yeah, I think we're definitely on the page at the same page of that. But we can go start going in the

details of all these as we deconstruct my whole field. Okay, so I want to I want to circle back to GRIT. But let's cover the I T for a second. Because you brought up most recently, you brought up the diversity trainings. What is the rigorous research when you looked into literature show about the effectiveness of these kinds of trainings and the use of the I T in those trainings. They're the biggest meta analysis suggests that there's some interventions that

can maybe change your I A T score. I should say your I T score is inherently noisy because the test retest reliability is so low. No one's been able to come up with an intervention that actually changes behavior. And behavior is what we care about, because if the theory was, isn't that your ITT score points to behavior

predicts behavior. I don't think anyone would really care about so the it I believe in terms of changing individual behavior, I'm not aware of any evidence of interventions that actually do that. Yeah, And also that's a really good point. The correlation is very, very small between the it score and your actual instances of discrimination racial discrimination in the real world. Now when that's even been measured, that's mostly been measured in lab setting. So even even there the

sort of an external validity problem. But yeah, yeah, it's interesting because Greenwald still defend, you know, still vietmentally defends the ITT I believe. Well, not only that, but Banaji was on a Today Show segment like a month ago that didn't I that, you know, I sort of almost rage quid over that, Like there was in the year

twenty twenty one. No one should be doing these segments that doesn't at least acknowledge the statistical critiques, And this exposed the test of potentially millions of more people who won't be away of that. So that frustrated me. Yeah. The one thing that always occur to me as as kind of as cool about the test is that I think it can tap into an understanding of the societal's most prevalent associations or or things that you know, like like I do think the media has an effect on

our unconscious associations, et cetera, et cetera. To me, it's much more interesting as an index of cultural you know, consciousness. Yeah, that would be true except for the fact that there's some evidence that it's measuring other stuff, not just like actual cultural associations. So there's some evidence that if you are the more aware you are that black people are oppressed in society, that gives you a higher SAT score sat IoT score. That's different from saying that you've actually

internalized cultural messages. And part of the problem here is an individual I score appears to be complicated mix of different things and has to me, to my mind, been overhyped as like this is actually measuring your implicit bias. Your broader point, though, is totally true. I'm sure implicit bias exists and affect some outcomes. I just don't think we have an accurate way of measuring it. I agree. So I agree with my point again, and I agree with your point. You know, I agree with both points,

but one of them was my point. But yeah, I I Yes, this stuff can get tricky real fast. So let's say that you do the I and you find that people in the Black Lives Matter movement have more racial bias according to the I T you know, like

like like what would that even mean? Like like that I wouldn't want to argue, and they certainly want to wouldn't want to say that, like, you know, they they they they are they are more racist unconsciously, even though they're explicitly less racist, right that I mean that, you know.

So the thing is there are multiple ways to interpret this, and one one more parsimonious way is that perhaps the more that you engage that these ideas are in the forefront of your consciousness all the time, you know, like you seeing everything through the lens of race. Well, no, duh, the associations are going to be quicker to activate, you know, with some things that you keep seeing over and over

and over again. You know, if you're constantly fighting in the world of social justice and you keep seeing these things linked together by you know, if you keep seeing you know it's in your consciousness. Yeah, your millisecond reaction time is going to be quicker. One of the seminal early papers critiquing the IET was was titled, would Jesse Jackson fail the implicit association time? Exactly what I'm talking

about exactly? Yeah? So yeah, I look, I as I mentioned the book, like, I wrote a long article about this for New York Magazine. Some conservatives interpreted that as me saying implicit bias isn't real or isn't important. I think implicit bias is absolutely real. I think how important it is in the overall pie of America's discriminatory outcomes is very much up for debate, and that no one's to my mind, really been all the show it's that important versus other stuff, But it could be we could

learn that. Yeah, and there's some really important interactions here

with the with neurologically speaking with the prefontal cortex. I wrote an article about that for Psychologist Today about like I feel like ten years ago but reviewing that research showing that you know, there are there are huge moderator effects that explain whether or not some of these associations do become correlated in the real world, Like there are moderators that can move that correlation higher and lower, you know, because we ignored everything else and we said all is equal.

The correlation is weak, right, but there are some factors that make it more like with than others. If you have a very if you're a very impulsive person or your you know, your personality is you have a very poor executive functioning, you you kind of go like immediately from uh, from thought to action. Yeah, you know that makes sense that that you'd be more susceptible to implicit forces. Yeah,

that's interesting. Boom boom, that's right. Okay, so thanks for for bringing that up and telling you about the nuances of that. Let's move a little bit. Let's move, let's let's dive into grit now. Look, Angela is a dear friend of mine and I my office was right next to hers at the Positive Psychology Center at pen which you also take down and uh for five years. And uh, I love that you said. Sorry. I mean, there's obviously no, no, no,

you don't need it. It's an interesting real world example of how you're not just criticizing ideas, you're criticizing a person. And perhaps this book was easier to write because I wasn't writing about my friends, you know, that's right, that's right. So but that tells you something about why ideas persist

sometimes they do. But I also bring this up because I just feel like I can speak to it from like a first person perspective of like like you know, like like my experience of the of the situation, because I would have so many you know, angel would come after a long day of work shed. My office was right next door to hers. I had Imagination Institute right

next to the Great Lab, so that was fun. So she would come right next door and she'd be like, Hey, do you want to walk home, you know today, And I can't tell you how many amazing conversations we had, you know, walking home to her house. And then I would have dinner sometimes at her place. She would cook dinner and would have dinner with her and the family. And she's like ravenously curious, and she's so bright, she's so bright, she's so quick, she's so quick. And I

remember all of our conversation. I remember our conversations were so stimulating and and she I mean, we would we would really get into it. You know, we wouldn't always agree. I think sometimes maybe I did think IQ played a larger role, even though at the end of the day and we both have criticisms against IQ. But she would just you know, I would tell her about a certain paper. She'd be like, oh, tell me, we're about the paper.

She's ravenously curious. I think I really do think she wants to I think she's a good scientist a b. I think that she really does want to know the you know, all these various correlations, but she really does, she really does believe in grit and and maybe that's you know, maybe that's a problem. Maybe maybe it is, you know, maybe to the extent to which one should one believe in their pet construct to such a degree that and I would even make this case argument again

with intelligence. This happens again human scientists are human and and I don't know if any any scientists exempt from that. I look at intelligence researchers all the time. By the way, I kind of wish he took them to task a little bit, just because they believe in their construct, like I mean talk about and you know, believe in a construct,

and maybe you know, in a lot of ways. You know, it was important for Angela to kind of try to shake up the field a little bit and say, look, you know, it's not all about intelligence, you know, and hard work does play a role in it. Well, I mean, so it's interesting because personality psychology had been studying conscientiousness for decades and often what Angela found with grit was similar to what they'd found with conscientiousness in terms of

these correlations. So I think by the time I was done writing that chapter, I sort of I'm not sure American society that this was a new Like obviously it was new enough for everyone to latch onto it and be excited by it. But because we're so self healthy and we so value as Americans the value of grit and hard work, I think what you're saying, if you say it's true among sort of achievement researchers, I'm positive

it's true. I'm just not sure that it was ever the case that like Americans undervalued the importance of grit. I think we've always been into that. Yeah, maybe that the split between what scientists focused on versus what the general public focused on, and the second that the two aligned more that yeah, what and that's that it was

like wildfire. I will say, like, it's noteworthy to me that in both her book and her ted talk, she's forwardly is like, we don't know how to improve grit, which which already gives her points in terms of scientific integrity a lot of other researchers lack. And that's always stuck out to me about her. Even if I disagree with her on some stuff, agreed, I have found her to be quite intellectual, honest, and and and this is more of the added of the spirit, of the spirit

I get from her after knowing her personally. I mean, she'll be like, let's try something else to see if it if we can work Like we She'll say, yeah, we don't know yet, but let's let's try lots of things. And she'll have lab meetings where people will discuss ideas, and she had this idea. She's like, how can we objectively study GRIT, Like, let's come up with ideas, And

she had this idea. She tried this. Her and her graduate student tried a bunch of studies where they look to see if you could predict someone's GRIT score from just objectively looking at not a college applicant's prior history of quitting clubs, you know, like like you can actually look at their past history and see and count up and tally how many times they switched from one to another,

and it's quite quite quite a reasonable. Well, the problem with that study is is this is I this is a critique that I had to relegate to a footnote. She and her colleague or colleagues took a pre existing college board sir instrument that is not GRIT and they just sort of said that that's grit. So they correlated that that resume task, they correlated with this other instrument that if you look at it is clearly measuring something other than grit. And they just said, let's consider this grit.

So that's an example of like the slight slipperiness I don't I don't always like And if we were having this conversation offline at a bar, I would I would give you a chance, like look into it and make sure you agree with my critique. But that's just an example of like, in some cases, I think some of the research is a little bit overhyped. Yeah, and and you're probably quite right that is overhyped, certainly overhyped by

educators right now. I mean, who are all treating it like it's the panacea again, like everyone's looking for a penalcy, you know. Yeah, and and and and then within the science field, I think it probably is in terms of measurement, and and and Angela agrees with us because I've I've been trying to come up with a grit two point

oh scale with her. We we actually co we have a draft of a grit two point oh scale we were working on at some point yeah, and I have I have like three data sets of analysis on it. Basically she had. She fully admits that those items could be improved to more tap into what she really was trying to get it, because the problem is that there's

a difference between concept and measurement. The way I think that the spirit of what she was bringing to the table was was really uh new saying, Oh, I think there's something that conscientious misses out, and that's kind of

the long term perseverance and commitment aspect. And I don't think that she fully captured that in her grit scale, and and and and I think that's been such a source of this all of all these problem, you know, because all scientists have to do to try to validate her her theory and everything is using her grid scale.

So then they find it's pretty much conscientiousness, particularly the industriousness aspect of if you want to really nerd out, you can zoom in and say it's pretty much, you know, perseverance aspect is pretty much the industrious aspect of the Big five conscientiousness, Ye facet but well, and I know her critics, even her fiercest critics, said, there is this one little nugget of potentially useful stuff. So like, no one's discounted the scale exactly. Yeah, that I'll be interested

to see what grid two point zero looks like. That's really interesting. Yeah, And and and maybe let's leave it at that because in the spirit of not tearing down people, but in the spirit of perfecting the science or getting the science better, because I think that that should be what it's about. Really, I don't like some of this infighting.

I don't like it. Quite frankly, I don't. I don't like the scientists who get personal about it and then you know, they want to like the like they've become in their mission to take down you know, a fellow scientist.

Let's just all improve the science, because I think that in that in the spirit of doing the science better, I think Angel would agree, and I I certainly have have discussed with her, and I think that you know, there's these couple there's a couple of items that that that even Marcus Creed who wrote that meta analysis, said well, there's something here with these kinds of items that are more long term based perseverance that is doing most of the prediction and my goal with my thinking and and

my spirit about this is like let's let's perfect a scale, or let's get a better reliable scale that like zooms in on that, you know, double click, double double clicks on that, and uh and shows what's really unique about the great concept because I do think there's something there. It's just I think I see it as a measurement issue.

Quite frankly, Well, I mean it could be the same general trajectory as as mindset interventions, where you start with a lot of hype and then there's some debunking and you end up with like something that is useful to some researchers in some contexts awesome. Well isn't this great that we're getting so deep into this? Yeah? Man, So can you explain what it means to be living in quote the Age of Fracture? Yeah, Age of Fracture? I took from a with credit. I didn't steal it from him.

From a Princeton historian named Daniel p. Rogers. His idea is that in mid century America, Americans and sort of public intellectuals understood that we're all parts of these big structures. We're all you know, a lot of people are members of civic institutions or churches, religion, ideology, these all, you know, there's structure to life, and that doesn't mean that anyone would want to go back to the nineteen fifties, especially

if you're like the wrong gender, skin color. But his overall argument is we've gotten more and more fractured, and

American life is seen as more and more atomistic. And the way I connected to this to my book is, if we're all just individuals floating around in highly competitive markets, of course we're going to both want to optimize ourselves with the latest and greatest tweak and of course we're going to be susceptible to explanations of the world that rely on things like priming and biases at the expense

of like how wealthy are you? What's your local social network? Like? So, yeah, I think Age of Fracture is a really important book, and I hope a lot of people read it after they read it. Of course, of course, of course, well thanks for introducing me to that concept, because I was not aware of that. So I actually do want to

read go in and read that literature. I would like to double click or not to quick I would like to return to something I was I was talking about earlier, I said, is there's nothing else other than science really if we want to rigorously test large scale interventions. But I suppose, you know, there's other voice in my head that says, at the end of the day, like, if a self help thing, even if it's not scient to evalidate, if it helps you, like, isn't that all that matters?

So there's this other voice in my head, you know, because I've that that's a refrain. I get a lot from not from my scientists who write self help books. You know, I'll say to them, but you know, like there's no science in this, and they're like, but you know it. My grandmom says it helps her, and that's all.

You know, Like, at the end of the day, if it helps people, I get people will say to me like, you know, but I get hundreds and hundreds of letters a day saying how much my book changes their life? Right now? What would you say in response? I know what I think, I know I was, I would say, but I want to hear what you would say in response to that. Let's take power posing as a concrete example.

There's probably some people for whom, standing up straight before a meeting, hands on their hips like Wonder Woman for thirty seconds helps There's nothing wrong with that, But if the creative power posing gives overstated or false explanations why it might help people, that's a problem. If it doesn't help people on average, we shouldn't say it does. There's also just the issue of like averages or averages like

power posting could have a negative average on people. I'm not saying it does, but even if it did, there could still be a subset of people for whom it benefits. That effect could be washed out by everyone it hurt. So you know, if you read a self help book and you find it inspiring, I would just be really one of the first things we learned in ap psychologies that people are not good at evaluating themselves and understanding what helps and hurts them. And that's one of the

reasons we have clinical psychology. So I think, you know, maybe the power posing helps you because you're taking deep breasts during it, or because you're just giving yourself thirty seconds to collect yourself before the meeting or the negotiations. There oftentimes might be other explanations for why these interventions feel like they're working than what lay people think. And I think there's a role for critical scientific types to try to explain that. And also the placebo effect is

really can be really big. My colleague at Stanford, Ali Crumb, doing really good work on that, And I was actually surprised you didn't bring in Ali Crumb's research because I think that'd be a cool way to incorporate some of

your ideas as well. Because she's found that, you know, the mindsets you have over like that when you enter a certain one of these conditions can group dramatic and prove the extent to which you actually get benefit from them, especially in a pasebo situation, like if you really expect expect this passibo thing to change your life, you know, you'll be much more likely for your life to be changed. Yeah, and she's done some interesting stuff I think with like

food and calories and mindsets milkshakes milk. I think she has a title of one of her paper's mind over milkshakes. Actually, yeah, she's great. I was, she was my I went to grad school with her. So it's it's so like it's cool to see like your your your grad school buddies like become famous and awesome. You know. Yeah, So should we tackle self esteem. Now since we're taking it all,

we're burning we're burning it all down, destroying everybody. Uh yeah, I mean I could start with like the kernel of truth to self esteem that I mentioned the chapter. If you think completely worthless, if you have very low self esteem and you interpret every event negatively and you have a bad date and you assume that that's the signal you'll be unloved forever, then you know, some cognitive behavioral therapy would likely help you. And there's some solid evidence

for that. And that's a facet of self esteem, right, it's your mindset about yourself. My chapter is about this this craze that took over the nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties, mostly thanks to one California legislator named John Vasconcello's pretty soon like the whole country and a number of other countries thought that self esteem could sort of

fix everything. That self esteem lay at the root of problems ranging from academic underachievement to literal murder, and it, you know, it became a fad and a craze, and we now know Baumeister actually around the turn of the century did like a big study where he looked at all the past literature with some colleagues, and they found like, there's very little there suggesting a strong causal role for self esteem. But as always baby in bathwater, we need

to keep two thoughts in our head. At this time, the craze was over the top. People don't kill one another because of low self esteem. Usually in fact, criminals have high self esteem. Is an interesting finding. But also if you have incredibly low self esteem, CBT can help. Yeah. And by the way, the researchers found there's no such thing as low self esteem. It's really uncertain self esteem.

You actually find when you do look at self distributions of self esteem scores, very few people say they have no self worth. It's usually around the midpoint or at the high point. Well, that was one interesting bout mister pointed out, is that all this talk of an epidemic of low American self esteem. He's like, where is it. Americans are very very high on themselves. We're very like Lake Wobeganish. Yeah, it isn't. Also, it's a important distinguish

between self esteem and narcissism. I think some people sometimes people when they say when they make fun of of people, they and they use self esteem they're really they're really referring to a different phenomenon of narcissism. So there's a lot of important nuances here, you know, Like I think that it's good to have a basic sense of self

worth and a sense of self competency. But as I argue in Transcend, because I have a whole chapter on self esteem and Transcend, as I think it's a healthy self esteem is a basic human need, but it's one it's one that shouldn't be pursued for the sake of being pursued. It's one that should emerge or organically from real earned accomplishments and being a valued social partner. Well.

I'm not a big I Ran fan, but John Vaskinsello's took his enthusiasm for self esteem from a disciple and lover of eye brand named I think Nathaniel Brandon, and his whole point, which I think bascin Cello's sort of missed, is like there's the fake self esteem of looking in the mirror and trying to convince yourself you're great, versus the organic self esteem of like, oh I've accomplished some stuff, I have a beautiful family, things are going well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Good. Good.

I'm glad that you I'm glad that you did this. I'm glad you wrote this book justin early I too, I am yeah, I'm glad you wrote it. I think it needed to be written, and we need to be having these conversations even if people don't, you know, agree one thousand percent with every single sentence you say. You know, even some scientists might have some quibbles, especially the ones

that you'll look forward to reading them. And I know you, I know you, I know you are looking for I I know that you're You're you want to you You're open, you know you want to have that discussion. I do want to give a lot of credit to my editor, because he was the one often pushing back and saying like, well, this idea isn't Alex Starr is my editor, this idea isn't bunked. We shouldn't assume everything here is bunked. Obviously there's some element of your posture that matters, or your

self esteem that matters. So he was that the he's himself a skeptical guy. He has to be as a book editor. But he was whispering in my ear like, let's not go too far in the other direction. I think the book benefited a great deal as a result, So I didn't want to take credit for that. Yeah, I saw that, like I saw that. I saw those sentences where you'd go through a whole long two pages and there would be the paragraph but maybe we shouldn't. Maybe that's that was his his, his and fluids inserting.

But I noticed that it followed that pattern, you know what I mean, Like you'd go a couple and then and they have but look, you know, maybe there's something here, you know, if we, if we, you know, because there's this other study that did find maybe something promising. So you did, you know, throw a bone every No, No, that was that was nice. That was pretty nice of you.

I think, like just like the last topic I just want to discuss you, which is a very heavy topic, is the fact that the human brain really has an easy time latching onto mono calls all accounts. And I mean, you've written about this. You have this blocked and reported podcast where you you're not afraid of saying uh, protically incorrect things, you know, for the sake of if you

think they're true. You know, do you see a problem right now with with with people latching onto kind of racism as the single cause of so so many disparities, as opposed to looking at multi causal accounts. I think yes and no. I think I'm recording this from my parents' nice suburb of Boston, And I think anyone who knows the history of Boston or most major American cities understands that the suburbs were built by racism and to support racism,

and only certain people had access to them. And you know, if you read Tom Sagrew on what happened in Detroit in the fifties where there were black families with money and they wanted the same thing white families wanted. They wanted more space, more living room. They tried to sort of move into the Detroit suburbs. They were met with armed mobs of white homeowners. This stuff happened in the lifespan of people who are still alive today and often

hasn't been talked about. So part of the pendulum swing has been let's talk about that. But people don't always do a great job like understanding how complicated structural racism can be. And like you're saying, some we've gotten to a point where I do think sometimes whenever anything happens, it's assumed to be racism as the root cause, just

because that is the current conversation. The tragic recent example we saw was this mass shooting where, for structural reasons, the I don't know if these women were all sex workers or just messuses, but the women targeted were mostly Asian,

not all Asian. I think two white women died, But a lot of the coverage suggested that he was motivated by racism, when it seems like he was more motivated by these horrible far right ideas about sexuality and his shame and the sense that these women had tempted him somehow, which is ludicrous to blame your own issues on women, first of all, and of course ludcris to then attack them.

My argument for a long time has been if we reduce an event like that to one cause, whether it's racism or whatever else, we're not gonna be able to stop the next attack, because we're fighting with one hand tied behind our back. And I think in liberal spaces you would probably agree this is seen is a very important conversation, but the good faith attempts to understand events can sometimes bleed into opportunistic attempts to signal that you're

on the right side of an issue. So so if you go online and you say anti this anti Asian racism has to stop, it's not just an empirical claim about what happened, but you're signaling, like, I understand this is a serious issue, and of course anti Asian racism is a serious issue. But again that's different from whether we can reduce this particular attack to it. So uh, yeah, that's my my basic stance on it. Yeah, that was that was really nuanced, and that was that was a

very jesty response. Sociate. I'll take that as a compliment. Yeah, yeah, because and you should take it as a compliment. But yeah, I think that it's it's spought on because like I'm deeply interested in closing achievement gaps with various racial ethnic you know, and they're actually called excellent scaps. You actually see at the top two percent of standardized test scores. I mean, it's huge discrepancies when you get to the tails.

But it's a multi determined issue, you know. It just it just makes no sense to say the answer is just racism. You know, there's poor schooling, there's poverty, well and also you don't need again, you don't need to like I think one of the conservative beliefs that I'm softer on now than I was ten years ago is that like, family structure actually matters a lot. If you have two parents to look after a kid, that matters a lot. That doesn't mean we should morally judge people

who have kids early on. It means it's it's harder to raise a kid. Everyone knows this. Everyone who's college educated tries to have kids with a partner who's there.

But something like that, like like having a kid earlier than you should, that is also connected to structural racism because of you know, access to education or contraceptor You can still make that argument if you want, but like you're saying to reduce every part of this achievement gap to like, you know, people have tried to claim the sat is particularly racist, which I think you're sort of letting a lot of institutions off the hook, because like

we want schools to be better, we want people that better and safer families. I've observed the same thing. I think it's not to durrealis I got a really interesting email from a medical resident and he said that socioeconomic determinants of health. You know, is this really important new idea of medicine, Like whether you're healthy or not healthy has to do with a lot of things like your level of social support, your education level. If you're a diabetic,

do you have access to testing strips? Do you know what to eat and what not to eat? He said, he arrived in medical school excited about this new area that could improve lives. But the shift recently has been the only socioeconomic determinant of health they talk about is racism. Everything is racism, and that that doesn't help. We need to talk about racism, but we need to talk about other stuff. Yeah, and that that can generalize to the other conversations we had today, Like I spent my whole

career to understand what are the determinants of greatness? You know, what are the determinants of high achievement? And you just you know, you could say grit matters, but you can say talent matters. But it's it's a lot more interesting when you start looking at the malls, multi calls or interactions. You know, people who are more talented are going to

be more motivated to put in the grid. There are these level of nuances that when you when you double quick, you're like, Oh, it's the interactions that are interesting, you know, they most the multicollsal interactions. Anyway, Jesse, thank you so much brother for being on my podcast today. I thought, I think you read a really good, important book, and I hope everyone reads it, and I hope that we

can do better psychology as a result. Thank you. I really appreciate you having me here, and I hope we can get together in person sometime soon. Wouldn't that be nice? Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage thank you to join in on the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the

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